On January 2, 1983, the Japanese Diet called upon the Japanese Magazine Publishers Association’s Ethics Committee Chairman for a frank chat about the conspicuous increase of sexual content in young women’s magazines. In particular legislators were concerned about Gal’s Life (Shufu no Tomosha), Kids (Gakushu Kenkyusha), Elle Teen (Kindai Eigasha), Popteen (Asuka Shinsha), Carrot Gals (Heiwa Shuppan), and Maru Maru Gals (Toen Shobo). These were relatively popular titles at the time, with Gal’s Life selling a half-million copies a month and Popteen right behind it at 350K.

The publishing industry did little in response, and so in February 1984, Mitsuzuka Hiroshi, the Deputy Chairman of the Liberal Democratic Party’s Policy Research Council, spoke out in the middle of the Lower House Budget Committee, complaining about the plague of explicit sexual articles in girls’ magazines, which he called “instructional classes on sex.” Mitsuzuka took the struggle from the Diet floor to the media, appearing on TV shows to further indict the publishers. Prime Minister Nakasone also weighed in: “There’s a worry that the sexual depictions in certain magazines for young women may lead to crime” and then hinted that he would be open to legislative or otherwise administrative action against the publishers.

Results were swift. The day after Mitsuzuka’s Diet speech, publishers Heiwa Shuppan and Gakushu Kenkyusha announced they would discontinue Carrot Gals and Kids, respectively. Gakushu Kenkyusha was in a particular bind as it had a huge business in another highly regulated field: educational text books. Popteen meanwhile pledged a new editorial direction. Gal’s Life changed its name to Gal’s City to escape the increasing social stigma and took out all the dirty articles. This was apparently not what readers wanted, however: Sales dropped so violently that Shufu no Tomosha put the title out to pasture one year later.

What was this sexual content that the Liberal Democratic Party were so concerned about? Essayist Sakai Junko remembers Gal’s Life as chock full of “juicy stories that covered the rawer parts of girls’ lifestyle.” Gal’s Life provided a stark contrast to Magazine House’s olive — a title that imagined all Japanese teenagers wanted to imitate the “good sense and elegance of Parisian lycéenne.” While digging through old issues of Gal’s Life, Sakai discovers these article headlines:

• “Takada Namie’s Girl-Fight Dojo”
• “‘I’m sorry, baby’ — Abortion Experiences”
• “The Exciting Vacation Before We Got Secretly Married”
• “I’m not a prostitute! The Lifestyle and Outlook of Miho, who works at a Shinjuku massage parlor”

There are few images of Gal’s Life available online, and this cover from 1980 has much less controversial headlines (although it does sport the amusing promise “You won’t be an ugly girl (busu) if you read Gal’s Life!”) The general sense, however, is that the magazines had a constant stream of salacious articles for young women on sexual topics, all blanketed in a general atmosphere of “documentary” reporting.

In his book Sōkan no Shakaishi (The Social History of Debut Magazine Issues), sociologist Namba Koji mentions a few articles in Gal’s Life such as “Gal Sex Report”, “Document: Love with a Man who Has a Wife and Children”, and “Comparison of Sex from Girls All Across Japan.” He then makes the obvious but crucial point that these are exactly the kind of articles one can expect from men’s magazines.

Framed this way, it is hard to understand the LDP’s crusade against “gal” magazines in the 1980s as anything other than patriarchal sexual hypocrisy. The issue is not “sexual content” itself in the market but who is partaking. As we all know, Japan does not have traditionally puritan attitudes towards sex, and conservatives had traditionally been the staunch advocates of legalized prostitution (against a coalition of women’s groups, socialists, and Christians who worked to outlaw it.) While the 1980s LDP may have been mostly removed from those particular 1950s battles, Mitsuzuka and company did seem bothered with idea that young women — maybe even from good families! — were speaking frankly about sexual experiences and trading tips.

To the LDP’s credit, 1984 was also the year the police started to crack down on an explosion of new sexual services. And perhaps the LDP was most concerned that these magazines explicitly targeted minors and intentionally or unintentionally worked to normalize sexual experiences outside of middle-class social expectations — dating married men, getting eloped, having abortions, working in the sex industry.

Most likely, however, is that the LDP were confused by a different principle all together: the rise of working-class yankii narratives in popular culture. Titles like Popteen and Gal’s Life were not intended for the ojōsama princesses of CanCam or the demure aesthetes of olive. In fact, these magazines built huge audiences by ignoring the slightly imagined, internationalized consumer world of good taste. Instead they spoke to the “real” lives of lower class yankii girls. While the data is not presently on hand, we can assume that working class teens in Japan — who have tended to marry at younger ages, are less busy with schoolwork, cram schools, and extracurriculars, and have less parental supervision — had more sexual experience than their Tokyo upper crust peers. This at least is the message that yankii women have tried to create for themselves in their own media. Starting with these 1980s magazines and carrying all the way to egg and Koakuma Ageha, there have been more explicit sexual articles in yankii/gyaru magazines rather than “good girl” magazines like an•an, non•no, With, or More. And moreover, the most salacious part of the magazine was often the “reader’s column” — where girls told endless and exaggerated sob stories of rapes, bullying, sexual promiscuity, dead boyfriends, and abortions. (I remember reading an issue of egg in 1999, right in the peak of the ganguro movement, that offered a guide to “How to Have Sex in a Car” as well as a particularly graphic reader about group sex in the ocean that involved sea shells.)

Without much perspective on these class-clustered sexual mores though, one can understand elitist politicians seeing gal magazines lined up equally on a bookstore rack with those proffering middle-class consumerist values, easily falling into the hands of a girl who would otherwise read about Chanel suits and marrying guys from Todai. She would be ruined forever! This is almost the virgin-whore complex grafted onto government policy. Interestingly, however, one of the main readerships for the controversial gal magazines was likely normal middle-class girls who liked to giggle at the sex stories and make fun of the yankii narratives. Nakasone and Mitsuzuka may have not known that these titles also inspired mockery from the very girls they hoped to protect.

In the end, only Popteen survived the 1984 gal magazine massacre. The editors promised to clean up the content but then slowly brought back articles about sex techniques and teenage delinquent life when the Diet had moved on to other problems and scandals. It may have also helped that society went through a “sex boom” right after the Diet hearing. Akimoto Yasushi’s mass idol group Onyanko Club was suddenly on TV every afternoon singing about how “being a virgin is boring” and how high school girls needed to have sex with their math teacher to get good grades.

In the mid-1990s, however, Popteen eventually dropped the delinquent lifestyle stories and became a pure style bible for the kogyaru army. This may have ironically been key to the magazine’s longevity. Whether advertiser pressure or consumer demand, there seems to be less desire these days for Japanese magazines to do anything other than provide excessive product details on the latest clothing. Even when Koakuma Ageha takes up frank talk about domestic violence and hostess lifestyles, the idea is dealing with harsh realities rather than sensationalizing for girls who want to fantasize about adult activities.

Yet there appears to be latent demand in Japan for female-oriented stories of sexual exploits and tragedies, as evidenced by the rise of the keitai novel — which writer Hayamizu Kenro has linked directly to the “confessional” narratives of yankii ladies biker mag Teen’s Road. The Diet may have temporarily killed off the teenage delinquent narrative industry but they could not stifle all the curiosity.

Bonus trivia: When Mitsuzuka held up Popteen in the Diet, the page was open to an illustration by now famed media critic Miura Jun.

Namba, Koji. “Concerning Youth Subcultures in the Postwar Era, Vol. 5: ‘Ko-gal’ and ‘Urahara-kei,’” Kwansei Gakuin University Sociology Department #100, March 2006.

Namba, Koji. Sōkan no Shakaishi (The Social History of Debut Magazine Issues) Chikuma Shinsho, 2009.

Sakai, Junko. “Girls’ Yankii Spirit.” An Introduction to Yankee Studies. Ed. Taro Igarashi, Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2009.

The translation following this essay dates from December 1983. It appeared in the pages of Manga Burikko — the same magazine in which Nakamori Akio first introduced the term “otaku” to the world. For this third and final installment of the magazine’s notorious “Otaku Research” series, Nakamori is replaced by a psuedonymous writer “Ejisonta,” who maintains his predecessor’s tone of gleeful disdain for the magazine’s core readership.

Manga Burikko was (and is) a soft-core porn manga magazine dedicated to “lolicon” — a sub-genre of anime and manga featuring illustrations of what appear to be pre-pubescent girls in compromising situations. While this may sound royally gross to detractors, of which there are a great many (including, not incidentally, me), it’s important to note that lolicon doesn’t involve actual children. Rather, it’s a fetishization of girlish naivete and innocence, as played out in fictional stories featuring little girls. Photography of or contact with real children is not an accepted part of the “scene.” (In fact, Burikko readers actually demanded that editors remove photographs of teenaged gravure idols from the pages of the magazine. Like Japan turning its back on gunpowder in the 17th century, this has to be the only case in human history of teenage boys clamoring for less skin in a skin mag.)

Lolicon remains a controversial subject even today;  it is one of the targets of Tokyo Mayor Ishihara Shintaro’s much-debated Bill 156, which aims to keep portrayals of “non-existent youth” engaged in “harmful fictional sex” out of mainstream magazines and non-adult bookstores. One of the fascinating things about Ejisona’s essay is how clearly it illustrates that this tension among creators, consumers, and detractors is nothing new.

The most surprising part of the Otaku Research series may be that that Ejisonta and Nakamori’s broadsides ran in the pages of a magazine dedicated to the very same topic they were lambasting. But appearances can be deceiving. Nakamori and Ejisonta seem to revel in the “bad taste” of the genre; they never once question the value or morality of lolicon itself. The line they draw in the sand is between people such as themselves, who indulge while realizing just how fundamentally misanthropic lolicon is, and those who through naivete or a lack of social graces consume it exclusively, unquestioningly, and obsessively to the further detriment of the social lives that led them to lolicon in the first place.

As you might expect, this provocative stance didn’t exactly endear them to the Burikko readership. Outrage from readers culminated in the editor forbidding Nakamori from using “otaku” in the pages of the magazine, essentially killing the column six months after it had began. (Nakamori’s parting salvo is the stuff of legend; stay tuned for a translation soon.)

Ejisonta’s essay links the obsession with lolicon to a point only obliquely referred to in previous installments: the otaku’s defiant refusal to grow up and join the ranks of society. Lionizing the supposed innocence and open-mindedness of youth as a foil to adulthood is hardly limited to the otaku. In fact, it was a globally debated aspect of most subcultures during this period.

In a 1978 interview, punk rocker Richard Hell declared that “the extent to which you maintain the attitude you had as a teenager is the extent to which you remain alive.” To this critic Lester Bangs retorted “adolescence is one of the WORST parts of life… when the fun you have always seems to be tempered by some kind of stupid bullshit.” As you will see, Ejisonta takes Bangs’ side in this debate.

Clearly it’s a stretch to link punks and otaku; punks were all about giving the finger to the mainstream in the most obnoxious way possible, whereas otaku were passive rebels, content simply to shirk their obligations to society. Yet there are intriguing similarities between the two subcultures. Like the punks, the otaku were portrayed as a public menace in their heyday, lumped in with the likes of serial killers and marginalized to the point where “otaku” became a discriminatory epithet. Public broadcaster NHK only lifted its prohibition on using the word on-air quite recently, in 2008.

In another odd similarity, the otaku have been co-opted and re-packaged by the mainstream in the form of the government’s Cool Japan campaign — much like punk rock merged into the Cool Britannia narrative. These social misfits, who dedicated body and soul to dropping out of society, have now become ambassadors of Japanese culture abroad.

But here’s where the punk-otaku analogy breaks down. Whatever punk’s merits or demerits, gender segregation and lolita complexes weren’t really part of the package. Much as Japanese government PR wonks would probably wish otherwise, from the very beginning a major subset of the otaku have always preferred two-dimensional characters over actual human relationships.

Technology has only amplified the escapism that outraged Ejisonta and Nakamori. Modern otaku culture is increasingly less about nostalgically clinging to the anime, manga, or toys of one’s youth, and more about a single-minded obsession for simulations of little girls in tender fetishwear. Lolicon never went away; it blossomed into the trend now known as “moé.” Little did Ejisonta and Nakamori realize that their allusions to this superdeformed sexuality were merely a preview of things to come: an (economically) apocalyptic future in which the lolicon otaku represent the last saviors of a crumbling consumer kingdom.

“Otona Club” (“Adult Club”) Corner

Otaku Research : Conclusions

by Ejisonta

(Originally Published in Manga Burikko, December 1983)

“I don’t want to grow up.”

That was the particular catch-copy for a certain famed manga club, but the phrase perfectly captures the essence of the manga maniac. Manga maniacs and anime fans both (come to think of it, “maniac” feels too heavy while “fan” feels too vanilla) are infatuated with “lolicon,” refusing to mature, interested only in maintaining psychological stasis. All of us feel this to a certain degree — you, me, the presidents of major corporations, everybody. But the urge is far stronger amongst the otaku. Point out this desire for stasis to one of them, and they inevitably over-react as though you’ve picked a decade-old scar, occasionally launching into impassioned ideological tirades as to why refusing to grow up is so important.

This is why they remain in the manga/anime cultural sphere, maintaining a mid-teen level mindset and sensibility, reacting to adults who happen to penetrate from time to time with a “please leave us alone.” I’m sure they feel that their child-like mindset gives them a purer view of the world, but that is total fantasy. The way they see the world couldn’t be further from that of childhood or even puberty. Sure, the elderly always wax nostalgic for the glory of their teen years, but that’s only a desire for renewed vitality.

In reality puberty is a very difficult time. Old enough to be sexually aware, but too green to actually pull off the foreplay needed to be sexually successful. Normally one twists and turns and grows and gradually approaches “real” adulthood, but the otaku are different. Mentally, they completely refuse to vector themselves towards maturity. What remains is immature self-assertiveness, immature thinking — effectively speaking, immature everything.

Come on, your teen years aren’t really worth clinging to! Sure, we’ve all experienced the phenomenon of stumbling on some deep idea the creators embedded in their manga or anime. That sort of thing can be enlightening. But the more tenaciously you cling to that period in your life the less you’ll actually grow up. And all of us have to grow up sometime.

Let’s look at a real-world problem: you! Reading this lolicon-mag with a huge-ass grin on your face. Take a look in the mirror. You know you’re gross. Jerking off to stuff like this is nothing to be proud of.

This is why sad little children can’t resist clumping together with other “different kids” and transform themselves into otaku cliques. But as a famous lolicon manga artist once said: “Even otaku boys have a chance to meet girls, so don’t lock yourselves up in the dark. Go out and make friends!” Damn straight.

No man can live his life in a bubble. Everyone has to grow up sometime. It’s how you carry yourself that gets you through the trials of society. You can hang on to that childish sense of wonder throughout that, if you want. Maybe that’s even purer and clearer than a vague and uncompromising otaku worldview.

That’s the grown-up way of looking at things. This is “Otona Club,” after all.

Despite the valiant efforts of Mori Building and Mitsui Fudosan to class up Tokyo’s Roppongi area with mega-developments in the last decade, the neighborhood remains deeply divisive. At best, it’s a nocturnal playground disproportionally populated with the city’s foreign residents. At worst, it’s a nocturnal playground disproportionally populated with the city’s foreign residents. The hood’s spatial layout does not help things either: a giant highway floats above the main drag and plunges the streets into perpetual darkness. Meanwhile the Don Quijote junk store and Hard Rock Cafe may be some of the more memorable local architecture.

But let us forget the lamentable Roppongi of today and travel back to a brief period in the early post-war when Roppongi was the hottest neighborhood in Tokyo — thanks to some extremely wealthy young Japanese.

Tokyo’s youth culture had a rough start in the immediate days after the Second World War. First there was destruction, poverty, and mass hunger. But even when life became sustainable, youth were not a driving cultural force. Around 1950, there emerged the après-guerre tribe of boys with “regent” pompadours and aloha shirts who spent all their food money on pomade in imitation of Occupation soldiers, but they were mostly ignored as delinquent punks. And when Ishihara Shintaro’s Sun Tribe invented the “teenager” for Japanese society, they made their splash in Tokyo’s nearby beach towns rather than in the city itself. At the end of the 1950s, Japan’s largest city had yet developed a neighborhood set aside for youthful frolic. Ginza was still the forefront of cool, but intended for adult usage. In a brief moment in the very late 1950s and early 1960s, however, Roppongi took on this role as one of the first centralized locations where its mass popularity could be attributed to the presence of youth.

Before the war, Roppongi was an eerily quiet neighborhood populated by foreign embassies, bases for the Imperial army, and aristocratic mansions of the zaibatsu families. The plaintive sound of military trumpets would waft through the air in the evening. The firebombing of Tokyo, however, destroyed around 70% of the buildings in Roppongi, and after the war, the U.S. military reclaimed the Imperial bases for their own use. But this American presence created a new economy, and in just a few years, Roppongi transformed from a quiet backwater into a quiet night-life spot with an upscale American crowd. The area served officers rather than enlisted men, and this made a big difference in the level of decorum.

The neighborhood also had some of the city’s laxer entertainment laws, so establishments could stay open until dawn. Roppongi became the destination after the destination. When bars in Ginza closed up at 10pm, you could always ride over to Roppongi. And even when the Americans wrapped up the Occupation and headed back to the U.S., the neighborhood retained a distinctly foreign and cutting-edge atmosphere. Roppongi was the only place in town to get a decent hamburger or slice of pizza.

The Roppongi of this era was sprawling and incredibly dark. There were no department stores, no walls of flashing neon signs, no movie theaters, no famed landmarks. There wasn’t even a main street. You had to know where to go before you got there, because no one would be on hand to direct you. Even when the glowing-orange Tokyo Tower rose up over the area in 1958, Roppongi proper stayed completely undeveloped. Edward Seidensticker described Roppongi of this era as “the darkness at the foot of the lighthouse.” More critically, Roppongi was inaccessible by train — meaning you basically had to own a personal car or hire a taxi to get out there. By practice, this made the neighborhood an exclusive playground for Japanese with money to burn.

The mysterious atmosphere, however, was just the thing to attract young Japanese celebrities, actors, members of the film and media industries — and wealthy youth. With many TV studios built nearby, actors would finish their daily appearances and head to Roppongi watering holes to finish the day with their attractive colleagues. As for the “kids,” famed novelist Nosaka Akiyuki described those who haunted Roppongi around 1958 as “Mostly students at [elite private university] Keio, sons of corporate presidents or ex-government ministers, with about ¥300,000 a month in pocket money. Some of them owned six cars.” Needless to say, this level of “pocket money” was about 20x the standard monthly wage of a recent college graduate. Later on, almost like a post-war “Brat Pack,” young celebrities who called themselves the Yajukai — “Wild Animal Committee” — started to party in Roppongi. Soon being a part of this social group became a near prerequisite for entry into the entertainment world.

The youth congregation eventually became conspicuous to the wider society, and the media dubbed the revelers the Roppongi-zoku (六本木族) — the Roppongi Tribe. This media scrutiny promptly ended the exclusivity. When news reports of this Roppongi Tribe started to appear on TV in the early 1960s, a wave of middle-class teenagers descended on the Yajukai’s favorite watering holes, forcing the original Tribe members to abandon Roppongi for less crowded spots. The media-reading followers meanwhile treated Roppongi as a guidebook excursion: walking the very long hike from the nearest trolley stop, dancing the new dodonpa step at night club with a Filipino band, and eating exotic cuisines like spaghetti.

While this second Roppongi-zoku wave amplified the neighborhood for a few years, the entire Roppongi boom came to a complete halt in February 1962, when an angry mobster slashed the face of Yajukai member and half-Japanese singer Jerry Fujio in a bar brawl. In response to the fracas, the police moved in and purged the young set from the area’s nightlife spots. By 1963, the Roppongi Tribe boom had completely petered out. Roppongi would continue to be a mecca for dancing and adult fun, but never again lead Japan’s youth culture.

Although short-lived as a youth subculture, the Roppongi Tribe did demonstrate a few critical patterns that would become standard in the development of Japanese post-war youth culture. First, like the Sun Tribe, the original group were exclusively rich kids who abused the social freedom of their privilege. They not only possessed the spending money to pursue leisure at every turn but were able to move independently of media guidance. They didn’t follow trends — they started them. But once the ever-growing media discovered their fashion style and favorite hangouts, a rush of eager teenagers from the new middle class would follow in their steps. In response, the rich delinquents would move on to a new neighborhood. This pattern, not coincidentally, closely follows the classical model of “top-down” fashion diffusion, where middle-class imitation forces the upper-classes to perpetually move into new styles and trends.

Second, police crackdown became the common denouement to any explosion of youth culture in Japan. Law enforcement would quietly listen to neighborhood complaints about kids running amuck, but they would not immediately make arrests. They instead would wait until a high-profile incident justified a wide sweep of the area. This let subcultures thrive and cultivate for a while — before being completely dissipated and forgotten. An identical police crackdown also ended the Miyuki-zoku preppies who congregated in Ginza.

These two outside threats of mass culture and law enforcement would rain on Japanese kids’ parade throughout the post-war, but conflict can be an important cultural engine. Sick of being imitated, cutting-edge teens would think of new styles to distinguish themselves from the growing middle-class masses. And they would be forced to establish new hangouts when the police gave them too much grief. Although police was also a strong foe to youth subcultures in the United States and the United Kingdom, Japanese law enforcement kept a much keener eye on their nation’s youth for a much longer period than seen in other countries. And they would go as far as to make public statements about what was and wasn’t proper fashion. For example when Rudi Gernreich’s topless bathing suit went on sale in 1964, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police made an announcement that wearing the bathing suit “violated the law” — despite the fact that only a handful were sold in Japan (Chimura). Sure the Japanese authorities were overbearing, but this constant supervision would keep youth on their toes — always moving around and changing up their styles.

Kosuke Mabuchi. Post-War History of the “Tribes”. 『「族」たちの戦後史』Sanseido, 1989. (Most of the information in this article about the Roppongi-zoki comes from this work, pages 87-109.)

Edward Seidensticker. Tokyo Rising: The City Since the Great Earthquake Harvard University Press, 1991.

Across Editorial Desk. Street Fashion 1945-1995. PARCO, 1995.

Michio Chimura. Post-War Fashion Story 1945-2000. Heibonsha, 1989.

Well, it’s time again for the Tokyo gubernatorial election, and this year the vote is likely to be a referendum on three-time incumbent Ishihara Shintarō. You may be familiar with a few of the veteran politician’s recent statements. He called the Tohoku earthquake a “divine punishment” for Japan’s moral misdirection. Earlier in the year he made headlines after spewing bigoted comments towards the gay community, demanding publishers censor virtual child pornography in manga (without doing much to outlaw the possession of actual child pornography in his jurisdiction), and slagging on Japanese youth. One of his golden oldies was the statement in 2000 that sankokujin — an outdated and arguably offensive term for Chinese, Koreans, and Taiwanese living in Japan — would cause social unrest in the event of a major Japanese earthquake. There is not a lot to celebrate about the recent natural disaster, but the peaceful aftermath at least proved his prediction wrong.

Based on this kind of rhetoric, we should assume that Ishihara starts his day by standing in front of the mirror and dreaming up outrageous and ire-raising comments. (Or hey, he may, like top comedians, have a room of writers to think up edgy material.) Yet it’s hard to blame Ishihara for this behavior. His own life story has conditioned him to expect reward for malicious rhetoric. Ishihara — long before he became the figurehead of Japan’s grumpy old male contingent — was the legendary Bad Boy of the Post-War. Back in the 1950s, Ishihara was much more Dennis the Menace than Mr. Wilson. So while there may be much hypocrisy in Ishihara’s current call for a return to archaic Japanese values, we should remember that offending people with utmost confidence has always been Ishihara’s bread and butter.

Ishihara grew up in the posh beach community of Shonan, son of a shipbuilding executive. A classic example of the “wealthy furyo” (不良, “no good”), his stable background gave him the economic security to spend years absorbed in artistic appreciation and mild delinquency rather than nose-on-page study. He found his way into the prestigious Law Department at top public school Hitotsubashi University, where apparently “on a whim” he wrote a short novel called Season of the Sun 『太陽の季節』. He won the Akutagawa Prize for the work in 1955, which turned him into an instant literary superstar. The book instantly sold 300,000 copies, but the true full-fledged social phenomenon around Ishihara began when a film adaptation of the work hit theaters in 1956. A cult of personality soon grew around Ishihara and his brother Yujiro, a notoriously delinquent Keio student who made a cameo in Season of the Sun and then starred in the next Ishihara-penned film Crazed Fruit 『狂った果実』. Cultural critic Oya Soichi named the boys and their friends the “Taiyo-zoku” — The Sun Tribe, a pun on their beach-side lifestyle, the book title, and the post-war fallen aristocrats called “Shayo-zoku” (More on the etymology here).

The emergence of the Sun Tribe ran parallel with the birth of the “teenager” in other countries, although the scale and scope in Japan was much less significant than American Graffiti-era teenyboppers in the U.S. The distinction was also more explicitly philosophical than what was happening in the consumer paradise of America. Ishihara and his cohorts were triumphantly eschewing wartime values and embracing a new cultural milieu distinct from their parents. This idea is extremely clear in Season of the Sun.

The main character of the book is Tsugawa Tatsuya — a university student and boxing club member who enjoys womanizing at urban dance clubs and sail-boating out on Shonan Beach. While cruising for babes in Ginza one weekend in his finest suit, he meets the wealthy and intriguingly-decadent Eiko. She ends up stalking him at his boxing match and takes him afterward to the hospital in her own car (which needless to say, was not a “normal” thing for anyone to own at this point in the mid-1950s). Without going into all the gory details, Tatsuya and Eiko go off-and-on again throughout the short novel, pursuing flings to make the other jealous, and being generally mean to each other. The book ends with Tatsuya telling Eiko to end her accidental pregnancy with his child by abortion, but since he has taken so long to make his decision, she goes for a risky late-stage operation — and (spoiler alert) dies. In a fit of self-loathing, Tatsuya storms Eiko’s funeral in the final pages, shattering her portrait on the altar and yelling at Eiko’s family, “None of you understood!”

The story itself plays with the excitement of post-war teenage life, but in order to be entirely clear on his intentions, Ishihara provides long narrative paragraphs on his theory of youth mostly unrelated to the main plot:

If the adult world feared [youth] as a dangerous force, second only to communism, this fear was groundless. A new generation brought forth sentiments and a new code of morals, and these youth were growing up in such surroundings. They stood erect, like cactus, without looking down to see that they were blooming in bare soil.

The young unconsciously tried to destroy the morals of their elders — morals which always judged against the new generation. In the young people’s eyes, the reward of virtue was dullness and vanity. While the older generation thought it was growing ever more broad-minded, but actually grew narrower in outlook, the young looked for something broad and fresh to build on.

For all of the setting up adults as the “enemies” of youth, there is very little actual warfare in the novel. The book may have been most shocking in that all the young rich Japanese characters live in their own little world: hitting hostess bars and dance clubs, driving around in cars, sailing boats, staying at resort hotels, getting abortions. Parents do not appear as oppositional forces — actually, they barely appear at all. The single scene of inter-generational conflict happens in a scene at Tatsuya’s home, when the father is showing off his relatively-preserved physique and asks his son to try punching him in the stomach. The boxer Tatsuya delivers a crushing blow, knocking over the dad and making him spit up blood for days. The episode has obvious Oedipal symbolism, but the rest of the novel focuses more around the joyful absence of parental advisory rather than its overbearing shadow.

The idea of youth-gone-wild in Season of the Sun is clearly what made the novel so exciting to other members of Ishihara’s generation. Ironically, student leftists at the time proclaimed the novel as an anti-establishment manifesto, passing Season of the Sun around during the long waiting periods at the 1956 Sunagawa protests against the extension of a U.S. Air Force base. The book was “progressive” in the sense that it defended youth’s role as a key force for social change and generally advocated the dismantling of the prewar value system.

The Ishiharas were also dashing, wealthy playboys who inspired a generation of post-war youth wishing for a return to prosperity. Fashion critic Takeji Hirakawa explained to me: “This was an era when there were no Japanese heroes. The MP and soldiers were good looking guys and stole all the best women. Everyone knew that the Japanese needed Japanese heroes to really bounce back from the war.” The Ishiharas filled that role, proving to their fellow youth through cocksure success that Japan would no longer have to live in the shadow of America.

While this may seem like a very different philosophical background than the current Ishihara, I would argue that he never made a tenko conversion to the right. There are visible traces of conservative ideology even in his early writing.

Most obviously, Ishihara has smug certainty about his world and believes deeply in the myth of individuals fully in control of their own destiny. The characters of Season of the Sun seem completely oblivious to the fact that wealth affords them the freedom to be delinquent and carefree. The Tsugawa brothers maintain their own sail boats out at Shonan Beach in the early 1950s — an era when much of his fellow citizens had just recently stopped wearing their old wartime rags and worrying about where they were going to get the day’s food. The government only declared the apres guerre period over in 1956, a year when the Ishihara’s were already conspicuously living at a level that would be considered posh even today.

Building on this explicit denial of class, main character Tatsuya sees his own successes as triumphs of will against all odds rather than building upon a privileged background. For example, Tatsuya becomes a passable boxer without any real training. It’s his “enthusiasm” and natural skill — rather than hard work — that make him a competitive pugilist. In a similar tone, Ishihara’s younger brother Yujiro quipped to the press about his film career, “Whatever. I can quit doing movies whenever I want.” Ishihara Shintaro is a deep believer in the “myth of natural good taste” — that idea that members of the privileged classes are imbued with greater aesthetics or natural skills without realization of the opportunity and access to cultural capital that come with wealth.

While these ideas stay relatively mild within Season of the Sun, these attitudes have slowly evolved over the last 60 years into something more sinister: Ishihara’s complete lack of sympathy for people unlike himself. He personally overcame difficulty through a minimum of effort, so why can’t everyone else get their act together? Ishihara’s father died suddenly when he was still a student, yet he helped his family make ends meet — in part by becoming a famous writer. Penning an Akutagawa Prize-winning novel took him only a few days. It is exactly Ishihara’s victorious and charmed life — proven at an early age — that make him completely disinterested in those who have to actually work to succeed, or worse, will never succeed at all. He is the classic “self-made man” — who happened to start on a giant pedestal.

Yet this streak of fundamental conservative ideology is of course not what made him so hated in the 1950s. Ishihara was PTA Enemy #1. Together with women’s groups and educational committees, Japan’s Parent-Teacher Association railed publicly against the sexual content of Season of the Sun, which they spun into a broader movement towards stricter censorship on motion pictures. In the book’s most infamous sequence, the main character seduces his girlfriend by punching a hole in a sliding paper door with his erect penis. This did not go down well with the older set.

But it was the third Sun Tribe film The Punishment Room 『処刑の部屋』 that really raised ire. (The novella on which it is based, by the way, is mere sensationalistic violence lacking any literary depth. Avoid.) There is a scene of men spiking girls’ drinks with sedatives to later rape them, and many teenage criminals who attempted similar things told authorities that they got the idea from the movie. Although mild in comparison, the media also devoured a subsequent story about a girl deciding to drop out of high-school after taking up the anti-social message of the film. Parents of all stripes hated Ishihara. While feminists disliked Ishihara’s violent, sexual misogyny, older conservative men had a fit over the Ishihara brothers’ boastful disobedience. They blamed the rise of the Sun Tribe on the formal outlawing of legal prostitution. They argued, if men had a legal sexual outlet for these violent urges, Japan would be free of menacing groups like the Sun Tribe.

But this is Ishihara’s problem today: His outrageous behavior as a youth — which was fresh and probably warranted in the 1950s — still informs his current personality. Shintaro got gray but he never mellowed out nor became self-aware. When he calls for censorship of art, he does not remember that once people much like him now called for the censorship of his own art. But moreover, we should understand him in control of his personality. He is not a “loose cannon,” accidentally saying things he later regrets. He likely thinks that success of his endeavors requires raising the ire of groups to which he does belong.

The question now is whether enough Tokyo voters will decide that Ishihara finally went too far in blaming the earthquake victims. The most likely scenario sadly is that his usual voting bloc will stumble out of JRA Wins en masse and cast some shochu-drenched ballots to make him governor one more time.

Reference works:

Shintaro Ishihara. Season of Violence. Transl. John G. Mills, Toshie Takahama, and Ken Tremayne. Rutland & Tokyo: Tuttle, (1966).

Kosuke Mabuchi. Post-War History of the “Tribes”. Sanseido, 1989.

John Nathan. Japan Unbound: A Volatile Nation’s Quest for Pride and Purpose. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004.

Across Editorial Desk. Street Fashion 1945-1995. PARCO, 1995.

Sometime in November, Marxy of Néojaponisme and Patrick Macias — author of such books as Cruising the Anime City: An Otaku Guide to Neo Tokyo and Japanese Schoolgirl Inferno: Tokyo Teen Fashion Subculture Handbook — met in Inokashira Park and recorded a very long podcast about Harajuku and the past, present, and future of Japanese fashion. The result spans over an hour and twenty minutes, and yes, we edited out a lot of the boring parts. Hear Marxy talk about the minutiae of his first visits to A Bathing Ape in 1998. Hear P. Macias talk about the high-pressure sales staff at Shibuya 109-2. Good news: it ends on an optimistic note.

Intro song: “1996″ by Cornelius
Ending song: “Volunteer Ape Man (Disco)” by Cornelius

Download: Harajuku Requiem: Marxy x Patrick Macias on Tokyo Fashion Past and Present
General Néojaponisme Podcast RSS Feed: .rss

Anyone interested in the history of Japanese youth culture is already familiar with the word zoku (族). Essentially meaning “tribe,” the word has been used to mark off a certain subculture from the mainstream and other youth groups. The 1970s working-class motorcycle gangs that terrorized rural neighborhoods in kamizake jumpers were called the Boso-zoku (暴走族) — “The Reckless Tribe.” The late 1970s kung-fu dancers in Yoyogi Park became known as the Takenoko-zoku (竹の子族) — “The Bamboo Shoot Tribe,” in reference to their favorite clothing store, Boutique Takenoko (Boutique Bamboo Shoot).

Not every youth subculture has taken the zoku suffix: for example, Kogal/Kogyaru, Rollers, or the Shinjinrui (“New Breed”) of the 1980s. But the word zoku by itself has come to connote “subculture” in a generally anti-social form: zoku are not just new “consumer segments,” but wayward youth with values antithetical to mainstream society. Zoku feels like “tribe” in the sense that “good society” spied into the wilderness and discovered them in the midst of some jaw-dropping primitive behavior.¹

Surprisingly, however, this sense of zoku as “subculture” only dates from the post-war. As Mabuchi Kosuke explains in his book The Post-War History of the ‘Tribes’ 『「族」たちの戦後史』, the word fell into its usage in a somewhat roundabout way. The key lexical element for zoku’s derivation is not minzoku (民族, “ethnic group”) but the word kizoku (貴族), which means “noble” or “aristocrat.” (The word kazoku 華族 also basically means the same thing.)

When Americans abolished Japan’s feudal aristocratic titles (Baron, Prince, etc.) and took hundreds of upper class families off the government payroll immediately following the war’s end, most of these families were forced to sell their property and belongings to generate a source of income. This organized impoverishment of the upper classes was best captured by author Dazai Osamu in his 1947 book The Setting Sun — Shayo 『斜陽』(The Setting Sun). The post-war media found his book the best descriptor of this social phenomenon and started referring to this class of fallen aristocrats as the shayo-zoku (斜陽族). In this case, zoku was meant to reflect the aristocratic zoku, not the ethnic zoku. In other words, “socioeconomic class” not “tribe.”

But just as any American political scandal takes on the suffix -gate after the original Watergate break-in, the zoku suffix became convenient to mark off all new social groups. After the shayo-zoku, there was the Achira-zoku (あちら族) — the select group of Japanese allowed to go overseas immediately after the war, when travel was still restricted. The name comes from these elite travelers’ constantly evocation in magazine and newspaper columns of what culture “over there” — achira in Japanese — is like. The next was the Oyayubi-zoku (親指族) — “The Thumb Tribe.” Interestingly, the very same term has been used in recent years to refer to today’s mobile-phone obsessed teenagers, but the Oyayubi-zoku were originally the first devotees of pachinko. The old version of the game required specific use of the thumb for shooting the balls.

During the same period, there was also the SoLa-Zoku (ソーラー族), which has an incredibly complicated derivation. Before the war, there was the Miihaa-zoku — superficial young women overly interested in popular trends and fads. To create a word for post-war women even more obsessed with pop culture than the Miihaa-zoku, the media indulged in a delicious pun: taking the two notes “So and La” on the “do-re-mi” scale that follow “me” and “fah” (ha, in Japanese.)

The Taiyo-zoku (“The Sun Tribe”) rolled around in 1956 — youth infatuated with young author Ishihara Shintaro, his book Taiyo no Kisetsu (『太陽の季節』, “The Season of the Sun”), and his younger brother Yujiro. This time the zoku designation finally fell into the meaning “anti-social youth,” setting the modern usage. This also allowed for a pun on the original Shayo-zoku “Setting Sun Tribe” since the last two characters matched.

By the 1970s, the Boso-zoku essentially took over ownership of zoku, giving zoku mostly a working-class yankii sub-cultural bent, rather than just “youth” in general. People now refer to “the zoku” in Japanese to mean youth subcultures hostile towards the mainstream.

Hosono Haruomi, Takahashi Yukihiro, and Sakamoto Ryuichi’s Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO) have been one of the few Japanese bands to receive superstar status both in Japan and abroad. Their self-titled debut offered the world a self-Orientalizing synth paradise, something like a high-tech disco upgrade on Chinese restaurant muzak. By 1980′s X∞Multiplies, however, YMO were creating a unique propulsive techno-rock that augured the bright promises of ’80s culture and set the template for every Konami game soundtrack.

Be warned: the Japanese version of X∞Multiplies is not your standard LP: the songs are broken up with long skits from Japanese alternative comedy legends Snakeman Show. Snakeman Show featured three comedians Masato Eve (伊武雅刀), Katsuya Kobayashi (小林克也), and Moichi Kuwahara (桑原茂一), with Kobayashi being “Snakeman” in a name inspired by famed American DJ Wolfman Jack. They hosted a popular radio show in Osaka, but their appearance on X∞Multiplies would transform them into national comedy heroes. (More English information here.)

Although some of the skits on X∞Multiplies are nominally in English (including the wicked “I love Japan”), the American release of the album wisely banished the comedy, bringing in the musical highlights from YMO’s previous album Solid State Survivor to fill the gaps. Thanks to modern technology, however, the original Japanese version of X∞Multiplies is now available to millions as free illegal download on Rapidshare and Megaupload — oh, and of course, Amazon Japan import. Many non-Japanese YMO fans now have a greater chance to finally hear these “lost” Snakeman Show skits. (Purists, I know you collected these long ago.)

As I listened to X∞Multiplies recently, one skit struck me as particularly illuminating in regards to Japanese attitudes towards popular culture during the 1980s. So I translated the entire transcript of Track 11, simply entitled “Snakeman Show.” The skit involves a mock radio talk show with three young music critics “arguing” about the state of rock music in the 1980s. The argument is between Critic 1 and Critic 2 , with Critic 3 only droning on about YMO and being ignored. A few notes follow.

For reference, an MP3 of the track in question.

(Classical music plays)

Radio Announcer: Good evening, everyone. It’s now time for the program “Young Echo.” Tonight we are joined by young music critics, who will give us their opinion on the topic of discussion: the rock scene of the 1980s. Everyone, welcome to the show.

Critics: (all) Hello. Thank you for having us.

Critic 1: (takes a drag on his cigarette) We’ll start from me. See, for me, I order a lot of records from overseas. So with rock right now — what would you say? — there’s some good stuff but also some bad stuff.

Critic 2: I’m a bit different from you on that. I have a lot of musician friends in New York and L.A. who always send me records. And when I listen to those, there’s some good stuff and also some bad stuff.

Critic 3: I think Y.M.O. is the best —

Critic 1: No, but listen, I have a lot of opportunities to go abroad and see concerts. I just got back from going around London and New York. The thing I felt most when I was there is that there’s some good stuff but also some bad stuff.

Announcer: I see.

Critic 2: I have a different view on this than you! I understand English. I am always being asked to be on shows overseas, but I have to turn them down. The more I listen the more I see that there’s some good stuff and also some bad stuff.

Critic 3: But Y.M.O. —

Critic 1: Wait, no, there’s something strange about what you are saying. It’s not like that. You have to understand that I live my life listening to rock eight hours a day. If you did that, you would understand there’s some good stuff but also some bad stuff.

Critic 2: No, no. This is not about the amount of time spent listening to music. I own 50,000 records. I own 50,000. My LPs are all rock records. You listen to those and you’ll realize there’s some good stuff and also some bad stuff.

Critic 3: But really, Y.M.O. is —

Critic 1: You are totally wrong! If we are talking number of records, I own 80,000. All rock. If you listen to all of those, clearly, there’s some good stuff but also some bad stuff.

Critic 2: I feel a bit different from you on this. I do interviews over international long distance, and we really talk about rock. If you listen to that you’ll know that there’s some good stuff and also some bad stuff.

Critic 3: Can I say something? I absolutely think that Y.M.O. is —

Critic 1: You are so wrong. What you are saying is so off. Can I explain? In order to understand rock, you can’t remove the fashion. Are you listening? I am wearing silver London boots, right? Look. It’s not a big deal. I own ten pairs of London boots. If you think about rock while living this rock lifestyle, you would say that there’s some good stuff but also some bad stuff.

Critic 2: Wait a second there. When foreign artists come over to Japan, I hang out with them. I take them to tempura, shabu shabu. I have to take care of them. And we get a chance to communicate. So with rock, there’s some good stuff and also some bad stuff.

Critic 3: If we are talking about fashion, it’s all about the Mao suit.

Critic 1: Are you crazy? You are contradicting yourself. You are totally contradicting yourself. I host ten radio shows. I am going to host a rock show on UHF soon. Since I live in that kind of world, I can state clearly that I am the first person to really understand rock. So when you say it like that, I think there’s some good stuff but also some bad stuff.

Critic 2: No, no. I see this a bit different than you. I am about to produce a record! What’s more, a New Wave record! If you actually tried to make rock yourself, you would realize that there’s some good stuff and also some bad stuff.

(awkward pause)

Critic 1: (angrily) Listen, buddy! I don’t know anything about New Wave or whatever. But I am here right now as a guy who is trying to figure out whether to take Y.M.O. up on their invitation to play with them at the Budokan. There will be 10,000 people there….

(descends into argument)

1) The “mao suit” (人民服) is a reference to YMO’s use of the Chinese revolutionary clothing style as a band uniform on their cover of Solid State Survivor and at concerts.

2) At risk of killing the joke in an avalanche of overanalysis, the two critics are essentially saying the exact same thing, other than a small difference in conjunctions (and vs. but). But they are passionately arguing about who has the greatest legitimacy to make such a statement. The interesting part is how they try to build legitimacy. The two techniques are (a) proving the amount of records owned and time spent at the activity, and (b) proving direct interaction with the West.

The first method echos my earlier thoughts on the importance of “orthopraxy” in Japan: i.e., legitimacy from actual praxis of an activity rather than a more abstract sense of belief or “spirit.” In the case of the radio show, none of the critics have anything to actually say. There is no “content” in the message — only the meaningless “there is some good stuff and/but some bad stuff.” The entire dialogue consists of attempts to one-up each other in the arena of praxis. Even when Critic 1 tries to talk about living a “rock lifestyle,” he demonstrates this not through an abstract way of life or attitude, but how many “rock” shoes he owns.

For method number two of “association with the West,” I find their attitudes to be especially evocative of Japan in the 1980s. For most of the post-war, the entirety of “pop culture” was seen as a “Western” (read: Anglo-American) enterprise. Just as judo and tea ceremony are “Japanese,” rock music was Anglo-American — at least for the first 40 or so years of Japanese popular music. So proving “understanding” of this foreign art requires proof of interaction with the original locus of legitimacy. Although they do use their authority within Japan as a bolster to credibility, the rock critics mainly use connections to overseas: (a) direct importation of foreign records (b) travel abroad (c) fraternization with foreign musicians (d) solicitation fromh the foreign media.

By the late 1990s, the Japanese pop culture world had ballooned to an amazing size and had enough local heroes that young bands could find inspiration solely from Japanese talent. Ironically, YMO’s success helped weaken the inferiority complex that drove snobs to always look abroad. YMO and Snakeman Show, however, were of the generation who still saw the ultimate cool as being a link to overseas — or perhaps, they wanted to parody this widely-held attitude as a tired cliché of Japan’s cultural elite.

3) Any reference to UHF dates the material rather nicely.

As a skater/punk kid in the upstate New York countryside during the ’80s, a big factor in educating my would-be musical taste was reading Thrasher when I could get my hands on a copy. (Note that this was in the last few years that Thrasher still devoted a lot of time to punk.)

There were a number of articles on Japanese thrash and hardcore bands, stuff that would only make it into the hands of affluent record collectors in NYC, not the hayseed outskirts of Albany. I was consuming a steady diet of early thrash, speed metal, crossover, and punk and hardcore cassettes.

Somewhere along the way, a friend gave me a cassette that had a few Lipcream songs on it, and this was the proof in the pudding — the ferocity of those songs outmatched a lot of American bands. They were stripped-down, forceful, and grinding. No solos, no over-the-top glammy vocals, just hardcore-by-the-numbers, but played with speed and acumen that really stood out.

Fast forward 20 years and the wonder that is the internet has unearthed a ton of rips of vinyl from those golden years where I missed out on everything. I’ve been listening to a lot of them lately and have compiled what will potentially be the first in a series of podcasts that capture the essence of Japanese crust-oriented punk, hardcore, d-beat, thrash, and assorted metal micro-genres.

Volume One is fairly pan-Japanese in scope.Iconoclast hail from Kanazawa, Hakuchi from Niigata, D.O.N.D.O.N., Lipcream, and Disprove from Tokyo, Effigy from Takamatsu, and Gudon from Hiroshima. This volume is fairly Gudon-heavy, as I just really like their music — aggressive, fast, growling hardcore played with nerd-like technical ability and recorded with detailed production.

File: mp3
Feed: .rss feed for iTunes etc.

Track List:

1. Gudon “Hikashibou (Stoic Violence)” (from the “Hikashibou” EP, 1986)

2. Lipcream “Top Fight” (from the Anglican Scrape Fight compilation 7″ flexi)

3. Iconoclast “Silence equals death” (from the “Who Does the Freedom and Equality Exist For?” 7″ EP, 1985)

4. Hakuchi “The tragedy to be expected” (from the “Gods Disturb” 7″, 1993)

5. Damnable Excite Zombies “Sect (Suck your soul)” (from the “Suck Your Soul 7″, 1992)

6. Bastard “Slick plot” from the “Controlled in the Frame” 7″ EP, 1989)

7. Disclose “Just Another Warsystem” (from the Disclose/World Burns to Death split 7″, 2004)

8. Disprove “Deep mist” (from self-titled 7″)

9. D.O.N.D.O.N. “Nuclear Reek” (from the “Commercialism” 7″, 1990)

10. Warhead Junk “Troops to Murder” (from the Warhead Junk/Gudon “Bloodsucking Freaks” split 7″, 1991)

11. Iconoclast “Warlike Nation” (from the Meaningful Consolidation” 2×7″ EP)

12. Mink Oil “Youth of Height” (from the “Smashing Odds Ness!!” 8″ compilation, 1988)

13. Gudon “Burst your Head” (from the “Hikashibou” EP, 1986)

14. Gudon “Egger” (from the “Howling Communication” EP, 1987)

15. Effigy “Mortalwar” (from the Effigy/Aparat split 7″, 2000)

16. Effigy “From Hell (Summer Devils)” (from the “From Hell” 7″ single, 2001)

17. Gudon “Power of Dusk” (from the “Howling Communication” EP, 1987)

Soundmark vocals by Sam Farfsing and Snowy D. Bear. There is a surprise bonus track in here, as well. First person to correctly identify it wins this. (Hint: It contains Cookie Monster versus Skexi vocal stylings.)

In Part Two of “Otaku Research,” Nakamori Akio breaks down (or reinforces, depending on your view) stereotypes involving the mating habits of the otaku. Even more bombastic than his original missive, this column is an intriguing window into contemporary views of the subculture during the early 1980s.

A few definitions for the uninitiated: Minky Momo and Nanako are both examples of a proto-”moe” genre of anime based around super-cute girls with magical powers. And “Gekisha” is the name of a long-running series of cheesecake photos of young women in swimsuits that proved incredibly popular among the otaku in the mid-Eighties.

Last time, we got as far as naming the hordes of gloomy, obsessive boys you see everywhere these days as “otaku.” I think most of you can figure out the origins of the word, but it’s like this: don’t you think it’s a little creepy to see junior high school kids addressing each other with “otaku” [「お宅」] at manga and anime conventions?

The minute these twerps hit puberty, some of ‘em are inevitably gonna turn into stone-cold pervs. But you know what? With the way they dress, the way they talk, the way they act, they don’t stand a chance with a woman. See, these otaku are definitely lacking something in the masculine behavior department. Most of them leer over cutouts of Minky Momo and Nanako they’ve got stuffed into their commuter-pass holders — you could call it a 2D complex, or something — yet can’t bring themselves to speak to an actual woman. Those with milder cases tend towards androgynous idol girls without much feminine appeal or obsess over lolicon. A nude photo of a normal young woman does absolutely nothing for guys like this. There’s this one dude I know who flips out — “get that away from me! It’s dirty!” — if someone kindly offers him a porn magazine, but then again, this he’s the editor of [dojinshi anthology magazine] Comic Box, so I guess it comes with the territory.

Anyway. The one thing these guys are into is Kishin [Shinoyama’s] “Gekisha” series [gravure idol photos], which runs in the otaku magazine Goro. You know what I’m talking about — they always run stuff like “Write Kumiko a letter! She’ll reply to the ones that catch her fancy!” Now that I think about it, I bet you anything the editor’s mailbox is packed with tens of thousands of letters from otaku. Gag me. Just take a look at the readers’ column in any recent Gekisha compilation — it’s filled with love letters from the otaku! The guys writing about how they couldn’t wait for the next issue to come out so they went to the bookstore in the next town over; the 26 year-old salaryman who cuts out the pics of his favorite babes and saves them, and this is the real otaku part, only to get in hot water with his wife after she stumbles across the file; the guys who write poems devoted to miss-so-and-so, and so on and so on until you start getting a headache. But they’re out there, the guys who have mint-condition copies of every back number of Goro lining the bookshelf of their filthy, four-tatami-square hovels. There are even some who buy two copies apiece, one to preserve and one to use for… whatever.

Maybe it’s because they’re lacking in the male performance department or something, but these guys all seem kinda effeminate to me. These are people well into their twenties who, upon getting a new poster or something with their favorite anime character on it, get so happy and excited that their legs come together, their knees bend, and they start to bounce (this legs-coming-together-and-hopping thing being a peculiar characteristic of theirs). And whenever they screw up, they make these exaggerated fake boo-hoo sounds. It really makes me sick. There’s no way the majority of these guys will ever get a woman.

Then again, you know what they say: there’s a marriage partner out there for everyone. I’ve always sort of wondered what kind of woman an otaku might marry, but recently I had a scary thought. If an otaku marries an otaku woman, their child will be an otaku kid. And so it goes.

While neither long, in-depth, nor politically correct, the following 1983 article by essayist Nakamori Akio represents a watershed moment in subcultural journalism: the official debut of the word “otaku” as the definition of a then-new social demographic. Prior to its introduction, this anime- and manga-obsessed group was known under a variety of names, including mania (“maniacs”), nekura-zoku (loosely, “the gloomy tribe”), and even byōki (a play on the word “sick”), but none captured the diverse crowd’s distinctive esprit de corps — or lack thereof — symbolized by the word “otaku.”

When this first installment of “Otaku no Kenkyu” (『おたく』の研究,　“Otaku Research”) first appeared in the pages of an obscure weekly soft-core porno comic magazine called Manga Burikko, Nakamori probably had little idea that the word would eventually take a life of its own. It’s important to note that he didn’t coin the actual word, which is nothing more than a politer-than-polite way of saying “you” in Japanese. Perhaps because of this, “otaku” wouldn’t gain widespread popularity until 1989, after a one-two PR punch of Nakamori using the term in his biography of notorious serial killer Miyazaki Tsutomu, combined with the publication of pop-culture commentator Machiyama Tomohiro’s bestselling book Otaku no Hon (“The Otaku Book”) the same year.

From humble roots, “otaku” flowered to become the de facto term for individuals who pursue their hobbies with a single-minded passion bordering on obsession. As part of a series, here is our original translation of Nakamori’s first column in “Otaku no Kenkyu” — which we believe has never before appeared in English.

Ever heard of “Comiket” (also abbreviated as “Comike”)? I only went for the first time myself last year, at the ripe old age of 23, and let me tell you: it was a trip. It’s like a festival for manga freaks. More to the point, it’s a place to sell amateur comic books and fanzines. As to what was so surprising, it wasn’t so much that over ten-thousand young men and women gathered from all over Tokyo, but rather their eccentricities. How can I put this? They’re like those kids — every class has one — who never got enough exercise, who spent recess holed up in the classroom, lurking in the shadows obsessing over a shogi board or whatever. That’s them. Rumpled long hair parted on one side, or a classic kiddie bowl-cut look. Smartly clad in shirts and slacks their mothers bought off the “all ¥980/1980” rack at Ito Yokado or Seiyu [discount retailers], their feet shod in knock-offs of the “R”-branded Regal sneakers that were popular several seasons ago, their shoulder bags bulging and sagging — you know them. The boys were all either skin and bones as if borderline malnourished, or squealing piggies with faces so chubby the arms of their silver-plated eyeglasses were in danger of disappearing into the sides of their brow; all of the girls sported bobbed hair and most were overweight, their tubby, tree-like legs stuffed into long white socks. Now these unassuming classroom corner-dwellers with their perpetually downcast expressions have come out of the woodwork and swelled their ranks into a really rather surprising TEN THOUSAND PEOPLE. And just because they’re here, they’re channeling all of their normal gloominess into freaking out. Some are dressed in costumes of anime characters, others look like a shady character from a Azuma Hideo comic, still others constantly try foisting off their “lolicon” fanzines on unsuspecting girls, the shit-eating grins never leaving their faces all the while. Others just run around aimlessly… Man, it’s enough to make your head explode. The vast majority are in their teens, mostly junior and senior high school students.

Come to think of it, manga freaks and Comiket are only the start of it. There’s those guys who camp out before the opening day of anime movies, dudes who nearly get themselves run over trying to capture photos of the “blue train” as it comes down the tracks, guys with every back issue of SF Magazine and the Hayakawa science-fiction novels lining their bookshelves, science fair types with coke-bottle glasses who station themselves at the local computer shop, guys who get up early to secure space in line for idol singer and actress autograph sessions, boys who spent their childhoods going to the best cram-schools but turn into timid fish-eyed losers, guys who won’t shut up when the topic of audio gear comes around. These people are normally called “maniacs” or “fanatics,” or at best “nekura-zoku” (“the gloomy tribe”), but none of these terms really hit the mark. For whatever reason, it seems like a single umbrella term that covers these people, or the general phenomenon, hasn’t been formally established. So we’ve decided to designate them as the “otaku,” and that’s what we’ll be calling them from now on.

The question of why we’re calling them “otaku,” and the debate over exactly what “otaku” means, we’d like to explore in leisurely detail over subsequent installments. But in the meantime, take a good look around yourself, and we think you’ll see them — that’s right, there they are — the o…ta…ku….

So, what kind of otaku are you?